We’ve been reading the data wrong

In a classroom somewhere in New Mexico, a student sits with a book that, not long ago, would have felt out of reach. The sentences are longer now, the vocabulary more demanding. Progress comes slowly, sometimes unevenly, but it comes. Line by line, the story begins to make sense.

There’s no ranking attached to that moment. No headline. No percentage to capture it.

For decades, though, the story told about New Mexico’s students, especially in reading, has been defined almost entirely by numbers like that. Proficiency rates. National comparisons. Lists that seem to place the state near the bottom, again and again.

It’s a narrative that feels settled. It’s also one that some educators say has never fully matched what they see in classrooms.

“I've never thought that New Mexico was always dead last in the country, year after year,” said Lee White, superintendent of Loving School District. “I couldn't figure that out.”

That disconnect isn’t new.

Stan Rounds, executive director of the New Mexico Coalition of Educational Leaders, said the perception has followed the state for most of his career.

“When I became a superintendent in 1983, “A Nation at Risk” had just come out saying public education was failing,” Rounds said. “My entire career has been under the shadow of that.”

So the question persisted: What’s really happening?

“That’s what we asked — a real honest question,” Rounds said. “How are we really doing?”

In Clovis, Superintendent Renee Russ had been asking a similar question years earlier.

Looking at national data tied to military communities, the kind used by the Air Force to evaluate schools near bases, she saw something that didn’t line up with the narrative.

“We were far outpacing others in the rate of learning,” Russ said. “It never seemed logical that if we’re growing that much faster, we’d still be at the bottom.”

The contradiction pointed to something deeper — not necessarily a lack of performance, but a problem with how performance was being measured.

A deeper look at NAEP, the national assessment often used for comparisons, only added to the uncertainty. White began digging into the data.

“I realized my district in Loving hasn’t been tested in six years,” he said. “Yet we’re lumped in with everyone else.”

NAEP samples about 1.5 percent of students and reports only statewide results. For educators on the ground, that left a gap between perception and reality. What they wanted was something more complete.

So the coalition partnered with Evress Analytics to take a different approach — one built on real student data from districts across the state.

They gathered years of reading results from multiple assessments and translated them into a common measure known as a Lexile score, allowing apples-to-apples comparisons across systems and states.

“It normalizes everything,” Rounds said. “It puts it all on the same basis so you can make real comparisons.”

For Russ, that common language mattered.

“Lexile is something teachers understand,” she said. “It’s used everywhere, and it lets you look at performance through a different lens without waiting for a single end-of-year test.”

They didn’t set out to prove a point.

“We told them, if we’re failing, tell us we’re failing,” Rounds said. “We just wanted to know the truth.”

What came back was something different from the narrative New Mexico has lived with.

“We’re not best, but we’re certainly not worst,” Rounds said. “We’re somewhere in the middle.”

The result is a different way of looking at reading success, one that focuses less on a single moment and more on the path students take over time. The report compares traditional testing to a photograph: a snapshot of where a student lands at the end of the year.

It’s clean. It’s simple.

It’s also incomplete.

When researchers looked instead at growth over time, the picture changed.

Students across New Mexico are making steady gains in reading, progressing from grade to grade in ways that often align with, and sometimes exceed, national growth patterns.

It’s not a story of dramatic leaps, but of consistent movement forward.

“You're taking someone at their level and how they are performing against that standard,” said Las Cruces Public Schools Superintendent Ignacio Ruiz. “The expectation is that we get the kid to the standard, to the grade level, but if they're coming in at a second-grade level, we know it's almost impossible that you're going to get them all the way to fourth grade level that one year. It's that we're making that progress.”

The other piece in Las Cruces is what Ruiz calls, “stretch growth.” The teachers in LCPS are hard at work trying to close that gap.

“That’s why growth is so important,” Ruiz said. “Proficiency, that one-time test, shows the finish line.”

So why does it still look like the state is falling behind?

Part of the answer lies not in the students, but in the bar they’re being asked to clear. Every state defines “proficient” differently. When researchers compared those expectations on the same scale, they found New Mexico’s standards are often higher than the national average.

“What we found is we have higher standards than virtually anywhere else,” Rounds said. “And that’s led us to be mischaracterized.”

The implications show up in real-world comparisons.

“In some areas, we’re beating Texas scores,” Rounds said. “If our students took their test, many of them would be above proficiency there.”

Same students. Different standards.

For educators in Las Cruces, that distinction matters.

“Think of it as a race,” Ruiz said. “Proficiency is where you’re at when you finish the race. But we also have to look at growth.”

Ruiz said the Lexile-based approach helps show that progress more clearly.

“Once you put us on that level playing field, in many areas, we're exceeding where Arizona is and where Texas is.”

For state Sen. Bill Soules, that kind of data reinforces something policymakers don’t always have the patience to hear.

“I think this provides fuel that the investments we’ve been making are making a difference,” Soules said.

But Russ said what happens next may be just as important as what the data shows. Too often, she said, decisions are made without the full picture.

“I don’t think legislators always see the growth,” she said. “So every year it becomes, ‘We’ve got to change this, we’ve got to change that.’”

That constant change, she said, can work against the very progress the data is beginning to show.

“Nothing can take root if you don’t give it time,” Russ said. “You’ve got to allow training, implementation — let it work before you move on to something else.”

Soules framed it more simply.

“Education is like buying savings bonds,” he said. “You don’t expect full value a year later. You’ve got to let it mature.”

That long view matters, not just for schools, but for communities like Las Cruces trying to grow.

“If all people hear is that New Mexico is last, why would they move here?” Soules said. “How do you recruit businesses or doctors if they think their kids are going to bad schools?”

The study, he said, helps counter that perception.

“This shows the schools aren’t bad. They’re making a real difference in kids’ lives.”

That doesn’t erase the challenges. High poverty rates, absenteeism and learning disruptions continue to shape classrooms across the state.

But the data suggests those challenges exist alongside measurable progress.

“We’re seeing improvement year over year,” Rounds said.

Back in that classroom, the student keeps reading. The gains are small. Sometimes hard to see. Easy to miss if you’re only looking for a final score.

Across Las Cruces and across New Mexico, those gains are building, year after year, into something the old narrative never quite captured.

Not a system stuck at the bottom. But one climbing.

And if this study proves anything, it may be this: The problem hasn’t only been the results. It’s been how we’ve been reading them.